eeking to piggyback on the success of the Paramount neo-Western TV series , starring Kevin Costner, the on-demand service Fox Nation hired the actor to narrate its, marking the sesquicentennial of that national park. The series features spectacular footage of such highlights as Yellowstone Falls, Grand Prismatic Spring, Old Faithful and the Lamar Valley. Unfortunately, as often happens when Hollywood meets history, history suffers. Costner contends that Congress, with the complicity of big business (“powerful people who wanted the land for themselves”), sent geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden and his scientific party to the region in 1871 to “tear it to shreds in the name of progress,” and that it was Hayden who had a change of heart and lobbied for its protection. But the alleged “battle between the regular guy against the impossibly huge behemoth that is the United States government” never happened. For one, it was Congress that funded the expedition, Hayden taking his orders from the Department of the Interior. For another, investment banker Jay Cooke (financier of the Northern Pacific Railway) was among the most vocal proponents for Yellowstone’s preservation as a national park and provided the expedition with the services of artist Thomas Moran, whose monumental paintings of Yellowstone were seminal in convincing Congress to protect it. On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act that created the park. At one point in inappropriately grand music accompanies the spectacle of a bison scratching itself on a tree — consider that one more reason to watch this beautiful footage with the sound turned down.
